Throughout U.S. history, national crises have been used to suspend constitutional protections and attack basic rights. After the Civil War, with the nation in crisis, the promise of 40 acres and a mule to freed slaves was promptly betrayed.
There is a triple layer of jargon when writing about climate change. You have the scientists, who are very cautious now because of the amount of climate denial. Then you have the U.N. jargon - I had to carry around a glossary of terms. It was like an alphabet soup.
A new bubble will replace the old one. A new technology will come along to fix the messes we made with the last one. In a way, that is the story of the settling of the Americas, the supposedly inexhaustible frontier to which Europeans escaped.
The problem with Donald Trump is that he went and designed a brand that is entirely amoral.
I've been trying to pinpoint what keeps drawing me back to the Gulf of Mexico, because I'm Canadian, and I can draw no ancestral ties.
My grandfather was actually a union organizer at Walt Disney. He was an animator. He used to draw Donald Duck for Walt Disney.
I think I would say that there is absolutely no way to reconcile an austerity agenda with climate action. Our political class needs to understand that the fight against austerity and the fight for climate action are the same fight.
A state of shock is what results when a gap opens up between events and our initial ability to explain them. When we find ourselves in that position, without a story, without our moorings, a great many people become vulnerable to authority figures telling us to fear one another and relinquish our rights for the greater good.
I think there has been this really bad habit of environmentalists being insufferably smug, where they are sort of saying, 'This is the issue that beats all other issues,' or, 'Your issue doesn't matter because nothing matters if the earth is fried.'
I really did have this powerful sense, when I was in New Orleans after the storm, of watching all these profiteers descend on Baton Rouge to lobby to get rid of the housing projects and privatise the school system - I thought I was in some science-fiction experiment.
That's the trick of free market economic theory: it doesn't just ask you to only be selfish and not care about others. It tells you that by being selfish, you are helping others. And, in fact, by trying to directly help others, you will hurt them.
That's the big mistake the environmental movement made - 'We'll scare the hell out of you, and you'll become an activist'.
If you're biking more and walking more, you're going to be happier and healthier. And you'll probably feel better if you take out less garbage, as most of us feel pretty crappy about that. But I don't think we can mistake those acts for doing what it takes to address a crisis at a global level.
Fossil fuels are - they're inherently centralized. And you need a lot of infrastructure to get them out, and you need a lot of infrastructure to transport it, as Obama was explaining in front of all that pipe, right? Whereas renewable energy is everywhere.
Brands like Starbucks came along and talked about their brand as itself being a community, the idea that Starbucks is what they like to call a 'third place,' which is not their idea; it's the idea of basic citizenry needing a place that is not work, that is not home, where citizens gather.
While everyone is focused on security and civil liberties, Trump's Cabinet of billionaires will try to quietly push through even more extreme measures to enrich themselves and their class, like dismantling Social Security or auctioning off major pieces of government for profit.
I had maybe watched 'The Apprentice' a couple of times. I didn't know that in later seasons they deported half of their contestants into tents in the backyard. They called it Trump's trailer park.
As soon as it was clear, in Copenhagen in 2009, that the Senate was blocking Obama from introducing meaningful climate legislation, the push was for him to use executive authority, use the EPA, use the tool of federal leases, and there was just a refusal to do it.
The more hardcore conservative you are, the more tightly identified you are with defending the interest of capital as an interest of the system based on hyper-competition, the more likely it is that you vehemently deny climate change. Because if climate change is real, your worldview will come crashing down around you.
Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are unspeakably rich.
